My 2 cents on given US politics, international affairs, issues, and etc

Menu

Democrat Leadership And Republican Leadership Dilemmas

To be blunt, after additional thought and additional information capable of being added, it strikes me as prudent to rewrite the entire post and restructure it.

Recall, the Democratic and Republican Parties are designed Top-Down and Bottom-Up, so they are institutionally accustomed traditionally being able to influence or otherwise compel their rank and file base factions to support Leaderships’ preferred candidates.

With the Democrats, their leaderships’ preferred candidate Clinton caused a rift with Sanders’ supporters, and Clinton also lacked the support Obama had from minority groups.

With the Republicans, their leaderships’ preferred candidates as J Bush, Kasich, and Rubio. Republican Leadership went as far to support Cruz during the primary and even flouted paralleling Democrats’ utilizing the Illinois decision to establish a form of super-delegates or decouple delegates from their State’s primary’s victor.

Democrats’ leadership has been very keen on seeking to unify and energize their rank and file base factions utilizing Trump’s Administration meanwhile Republican leadership has also been utilizing the Trump’s administration to attempt unifying and energizing their base.

When Hillary Clinton sat down at the 2017 Code Conference to discussher loss, not one person was surprised that she failed to accept any responsibility. According to her, the only misjudgment she made was using her personal email server, which there were no rules against, nor did anyone tell her not to… both of which are false.

Yet, this wasn’t the truly bizarre part of this interview, nor was it even when she blamed the loss on “guys over in Macedonia.” Instead, her most odd claims were that she was somehow the “victim” of being in the lead, and that the Democratic Party was incapable of the task at hand.

The DNC and its preferred 2016 election cycle candidate have descended into throwing each other under the bus despite previously highlighted that the DNC in court have argued they can interject for a preferred candidate.
The Democrats would be better off if Clinton quietly worked through her Onward Together group. If Clinton continues, she may have to re-announce her Onward Together group. Democrats aren’t going to go far shouting factoids as ‘winning nearly 3 million more voters’ compiled across 50 Nation-States’ election results to shadow Clinton only won around 19 Nation-States and clearly insufficient number of their individual State’s popular vote to win the Electoral College (EC) elector’s votes many of which are bound by their States’ popular vote except 21 Nation-States.

It’s the latest step in the party’s effort torevamp their polling operationsfollowing now-President Donald Trump’s upset victory last fall. There’s a sense of urgency attached to the project: The 38 governorships up in 2017 and 2018 may represent theparty’s best shot at returning to power before the 2020 presidential election.

The model the DGA hopes to implement uses other polling, demographic and commercial data to identify the universe of truly persuadable voters — the specifics of which the DGA and Pollock say are proprietary.

“It’s not just the undecideds. It’s also that there’s a bunch of people who may very well switch,” Pollock said. “Seventy or 80 percent of voters aren’t switching. But that 20 percent — who are they?”

Translation, the mechanisms will seek to tailor promotional public relations to attempt to better persuade voters for or against specific candidates in voter turnouts.

It’s not an academic question. Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota are all drawing mention as top-of-the-ticket prospects and settling into distinctive lanes ahead of a primary that will begin in earnest in two years.

… “We have to make the case in our politics for how electing someone is actually going to change someone’s life, and we can’t think of a better way than raising wages and putting money into peoples’ pockets,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union. “And when it comes to mobilizing communities that sat out the last election because they didn’t think it mattered, we think women will be able to mobilize them to get out and vote.”

(Bold emphasis mine)

Note in paraphrase ‘each individual is the owner of their individual body that mandates compensation for labor through wages, barter, or trade in which enables them to invest and acquire property in extension of ownership of their own body aka property rights’.

But there is a widespread expectation that the boom in activism among Democratic women who reject Trump — if it can be sustained — will provide a boost to the potential 2020 hopefuls.

… Since last summer, the preternaturally charismatic Johnson has been musing aloud about maybe, someday running for high office. When he revived the idea in a cheekyGQ piece last month (“Dwayne Johnson for President!”), approving chatter broke out across the ideological spectrum, from lefty Michael Moore to the righties atNational Review.

… “He’s a culturally unifying figure with a message of gratitude and hard work that also happens to be culturally edifying,” declared National Review’s cover story/mash-note. “The Rock is the right celebrity for our polarized time. The politics can wait.”

In case, you’re like me and needed to look up ‘culturally edifying’; one has to look at culturally and edifying.

To instructespecially so as to encourageintellectual,moral, or spiritualimprovement.

In other words, ‘The Rock’ is cultured intellectual who can instruct and encourage intellectual, moral, and/or spiritual improvement aka enlightenment.

Back to the article

Indeed, since Trump’s win, the political c.w. on star-power has shifted. Democrats in particular are being urged to mine the ranks of the rich and famous for promising candidates. “Democrats would be better off if they ran Oprah or Tom Hanks,” asserted Michael Moore to CNN post-election. “Why don’t we run beloved people?”

The logic isn’t hard to grasp: If Trump—previously seen as the ultimate political joke—can pull it off, why not Angelina Jolie or Will Smith? Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg? Or the one celeb to rule them all, Oprah?At the very least, it may be time for Democrats to start exploring what it would take for The Rock to switch parties.

In the six months since the election, we’ve obsessed about Obama-Trump voters but completely ignored their inverse: the Romney-Clinton voters.

When you look at who the Romney supporters being referred to, it may be prudent to note that the author is proposing targeting to acquire Republican donor class.

But if you want to see the future of the Democratic Party—and if you want to understand how Democrats can win back a congressional majority—then it’s important that you pay attention to a group of voters who might cut a less evocative image than their Obama-Trump counterparts, but whose support of Democrats could cause the GOP to collapse.

Perhaps, the lack of Democrats’ Leadership unifying and energizing their base factions is strategic rather than tactical.

Winning these voters doesn’t mean that we have to change our agenda. Rather, we have talk about the type of quality-of-life issues that matter to these suburban voters—which means advocating our same policy priorities in tailored ways.

As referenced earlier, this means promotional public relations to political ideologies’ ambitions and visions of the future tailored to a specific group of people.

“The problem is that we have a president who is not focused on the right things, who created controversy, who has taken the worst possible opportunity to attack the mayor of a city that has been attacked by terrorists,” Rubin said.

Rubin also described Trump as “the world’s worst client or the world’s worst witness,” noting the president often strays from the controlled messages crafted by his staff.

Kevin Madden, a Republican Party strategist, said Trump voters are invested.

“They still want to see their support validated and still believe it can pay off,” Mr. Madden said. “They have less trust in the people and the institutions that are trying to convince them they made the wrong choice, like the media and political elites, than they do the president himself.”

“They are more loyal [to Mr. Trump] than they are to the GOP, but they are still anti-Democrat and much more inclined to support the GOP,” said Glen Bolger, of Public Opinion Strategies. “There are not a whole lot of Trumpvoters who say, ‘I am ready to defect.’ That is not to say that a year from now things might be different.”

“One of the beautiful things about social media is it allows the conversation to seem very personal,” said Ms. North, a social psychologist. “In all honesty, love him or hate him, he has created a persona and a sense that he speaks to people directly.”

Sue Payne, a Trump supporter in Maryland, said the only people upset by the president’s tweets are his opponents, including those in the Republican Party, whom she referred to as “RINOs,” or Republicans In Name Only.

“He’s not hurting his case with his supporters and the people who stood in line six and eight hours to hear him at a rally. He might be hurting his case with the likes of Juan McCain, who ought to have been out of the Senate 15 years ago,” said Ms. Payne, referring to Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican and frequent critic of Mr. Trump. “He might be offending a few RINOs, and the more RINOs he offends, the better I like it.”

In a conference room near his office last Monday, House Speaker Paul Ryan gave conservative activists some unwelcome news: He wanted the Senate, House and White House on the same page before a tax reform bill was introduced, according to people present — and that would likely be after Labor Day.

Senate Republicans are also nowhere near a solution on health care legislation, according to senators and several people familiar with their talks. “I don’t see a comprehensive health care plan this year,” Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, said Thursday in a local TV interview.

In other words, as the special prosecutor probe into potential Russian collusion heats up, White House officials fear it could be a long, hot summer — with few tangible accomplishments to tout. And they worry how an antsy president, who wants things done immediately and has a rudimentary understanding of the legislative process, will handle it — particularly if the investigation dominates news media coverage.

(Bold emphasis mine)

Note, the Democrats and Republicans’ leadership and their supporters have splintered with their rank and file base supporters whose primarily unified and energized interestingly by impeachment/removal for and against respectively. Here are back and forth between Never Trump Republicans and former Never Trump Republican.

Apparently, the author originally wrote this article and garnered some responses by fellow authors. I’ll highlight some items that stood out to me:

Every time we do good, we make a deposit into our moral bank account. And every time we do something bad, we make a withdrawal. These conservatives have made so many deposits into their moral bank accounts that, in my view, their accounts all remain firmly in the black.

The first and, by far, the greatest reason is this: They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.

Since many so-called intellectual conservatives have an intellectual superiority complex, let me try cutting to the chase from a historical prospective.

Progressive Governance is derived by Bismarkianism political ideology whose sole ambition is to promote absolute authority through first governmental fiefdoms, then public-private partnerships, and finally pinnacles at public-private mergers who are also the foundations of Oligarchy, Kleptocracy, and Plutocracy through extended rule becomes an Aristocracy.

The ‘fear the Progressive Government with Trump at the helm’ brigade should probably fear Progressive Government, but they seem keen on merely being petrified by a President who both Democrats’ leadership and Republicans’ leadership opposes.

Moreover, I am certain that only Donald Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton.

I can think of a variety of reasons that Clinton’s political war machine would have sank J Bush’s, Kasich’s, Rubio’s, and Cruz’s political war-machines. Centrally, they have forgotten that the democratic process of election cycles are bloodless revolution cycles and meant to prevent a political ideological institution as per say the DNC or RNC possessing too much power for far too lone. If you factor in the Democratic-Republican Party who decoupled in the 1800s over first central banking and slavery, you’re looking at two extremely old and organized political institutions.

Kasich’s political war-machine being sunk to the bottom of the Republican Ocean would have been hilarious as the 2016 general election saw a recall election of a sitting Governor of Ohio trying to explain to the economic-political union of the Constitutional Republic of the United States over electing him when faced with a recall election for being nominated or picked VP for justifying his run taking his base support who only support him as governor for granted. It’s the gamble you take when you utilize factoids.

Then, when confronted with the sum total of his actions and his policy outcomes

… when your goal is not only to speak the truth but also to advance a concrete set of values that can and should endure well past any given election cycle, then the world looks very different indeed.

One has to wonder if words and actions actually matter to ‘conservative intellectuals’ as French, Kristoll, and etc after all in particular French and Kristoll advocate ‘those who do not benefit from globalization should move or die’. Yet another example of ‘rules for thee but not for me’.

We have enough cannibals on the left without conservatives eating one another up.

Indeed, Jonah Goldberg in National Review said as much, in a piece titled “Why Dennis Prager’s Analysis of ‘Never Trump’ Conservatives Falls Short.” He denied that we are in the middle of a civil war on two grounds: One is that it is not violent, and the other is that we are fighting a “culture war,” not a civil war.

… As I suggested in my previous column, conservatives would have been thrilled if any Republican president had achieved what Trump has at this point in his administration.

“But what about Trump’s character?” nearly all my critics ask.

… though I listed his moral defects in column after column during the primaries, I believe that Trump is a better man than his critics maintain.

… even if he were as morally defective as his critics maintain, my response is this: Trump’s character is less morally significant than defeating the Left. If the Left wins, America loses.

At an increasing rate, Americans separate themselves into culturally and ideologically homogeneous enclaves.

I’d argue that we face “something else,” and that something else is more akin to the beginning stages of a national divorce than it is to a civil war. This contention rests fundamentally in two trends, one political and the other far beyond politics. The combination of negative polarization and a phenomenon that economist Tyler Cowen calls “matching” is leading to a national separation so profound that Americans may not have the desire to fight to stay together.

First, let’s deal with negative polarization.

… Americans tend to belong to their political “tribe” not so much because they love its ideas but rather because they despise their opponents. The Pew Research Center has been documenting this trend for some time, and few of their (many) charts document the mutual hatred better than this one[.]

Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades. These trends manifest themselves in myriad ways, both in politics and in everyday life. And a new survey of 10,000 adults nationwide finds that these divisions are greatest among those who are the most engaged and active in the political process.

(Bold emphasis mine)

Back to David French’s article

These trends would be troubling enough, but combine them with “matching” and you get a nation whose citizens increasingly lives separate lives — living in separate locations, enjoying separate media, and holding separate religious beliefs.

… Here’s the New York Times, in a report shortly after the 2016 election: “The proportion of voters living in counties that were won in a landslide for the Democratic or Republican presidential candidate has steadily increased over the last seven elections and now makes up a whopping 60 percent of the electorate.”

Americans have choices, and millions have chosen ideologically closed enclaves.

A civil war results when the desire for unification and domination overrides the desire for separation and self-determination.

Adopt the civil-war mentality and you’ll only hasten a potential divorce. No, absent a presently unforeseen unifying ideology, event, or person, the idea that will save America is one of the oldest ideas of the Republic: federalism.

Federalism:

1. a union of statesunder a centralgovernmentdistinctfromthat of theseparatestates,whoretaincertainindividualpowersunderthecentralgovernment.2. (cap.)theprinciples of theAmericanFederalistparty,especiallyitsemphasisduringtheearlyyears of theU.S. on a strongcentralgovernment. — federalist,n.,adj. — federalistic,adj.

Note, the fact the States delegated some State powers to the central government aka Federal government is omitted or ignored.

And, this article by the author in the aftermath of the latest Comey Testimony

Trump’s primary protection against impeachment is and remains the loyalty of the Republican base and the Republican majority in Congress

The central issue here is if or whether Republicans’ leadership banks on ‘sorting’ and thus hatred of Democrats to impeach/remove Trump to preserve as many Republican donor class as possible with a President Pence or primary challenge Trump in 2020.

From what I can gather from discussions both online and offline (advantage coming from a Swing State), the main principle between Sanders’ supporters and Trump’s supporters outside their most ardent supporters who ironically are the people who most invest themselves into a given candidate or cause consider the long established institutions including DNC and RNC are nearly irredeemably corrupt that is the difference with distinction between Sanders’ and Trump’s supporters to Let It Burn movement who consider those same institutions as irredeemably corrupt.

Ultimately, the Democrats’ and Republicans’ leadership have several dilemmas to contend with.
-Unless they are putting their Party before the country, they would do well to remember outside their most ardent support; they are increasingly viewed nearly irredeemably corrupt to irredeemably corrupt.
-Their not going to win any favors from outside their ardent supporters to attack Sanders’ supporters or Trump supporters’.
-If Independent Parties opted to organize to counter the DNC and RNC, they’d overtake the DNC and RNC strategically (in the long-term).